Shorten flags small business tax cut in Budget reply

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has outlined his plan to kick-start the economy and create jobs if he becomes prime minister by further slashing the small business tax rate and turning Australia into a science and technology capital.

In his budget reply speech on Thursday night, Mr Shorten said he would support the government's budget measures on national security, drought relief for farmers and small business.

However, he called on the government to support Labor's plan to take small business tax cuts further - by five percentage points instead of the 1.5 percentage point cut offered by the coalition.

A Labor government would establish an independent Infrastructure Australia, with greater authority, a bipartisan board and more resources, including an $18.5 million boost, to drive new projects.

Labor would also improve the budget bottom line by more than $21 billion over the next decade by making foreign multinationals pay their fair share of tax and tightening superannuation tax concessions, Mr Shorten said.

In a bid to fill the hole in the economy left by the mining investment boom, Mr Shorten outlined a plan to turn Australia into the "science, start-up and technology capital" of our region, including schemes to invest in new companies.

He said Labor would make it a national priority to have digital technology, computer science and coding taught in every school, train teachers in science and technology and write off 100,000 HECS debts for science, technology, maths and engineering students.

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The nation should aspire to devote three per cent of gross domestic product to research and development by the end of the next decade, Mr Shorten said.

"Australia must get smarter - or we will get poorer," he said.

"Let us harness the power of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to prepare for the future."

The opposition leader accused the government of having no vision for the future, delivering a "rebranded, reheated and repackaged" version of last year's budget.

Meanwhile, the government on Thursday challenged Mr Shorten to spell out where Labor would cut spending and increase taxes to balance the books and bring ballooning debt under control.

"He will have to show us the money," Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said, accusing Labor of having a $52 billion budget black hole.

Tuesday's budget set out billions of dollars in savings to return the bottom line to surplus in 2019/20, as well as almost $10 billion of new spending on small business tax breaks and support for families.

But Labor says it won't support pegging new childcare spending to cuts of up to $6000 to family payments and paid parental leave changes.

Senior Liberals studiously avoided the term "double-dipping" used this week by Prime Minister Tony Abbott to describe new parents who accessed both employer and government schemes.

Senate question time heard one of the recipients of so-called "double-dipping" was Senator Cormann's wife Hayley in 2013.

"Our family of course worked within a system that was available at the time, like any other family," he said.

Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said his wife too had accessed employee and government parental leave schemes.